Soulcraft - Deep Imagination and the Reanimation of the World

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With Bill Plotkin and Geneen Marie Haugen

The exuberant, inter-species conversations that animate the Earth are nearby, accessed through the portals of our senses, in companionship with our deep imagination.

The deep imagination, from which emanates unbidden images, or impressions, in contrast to those we purposefully create, is also a principal portal to the mysterious terrain of soul.

Recovering our innate experience of an intelligent Earth (populated with both seen and unseen presences) and reclaiming our relationship with our deep imagination, not only re-enlivens us as individuals, but also erodes the outworn Western worldview of a meaningless, disenchanted universe upon which life-assailing business-as-usual depends. Experiences of our participatory relationship re-shape the ways we enact our lives.

Bill and Geneen offer a week of multi-layered experiential practices that shift our consciousness toward the depths, toward the wilder, mythopoetic current that streams beneath everything. You can expect deep imagery journeys, dreamwork, solo wanderings on the land, stream-of-consciousness writing, conversations with other-than-human beings, and poetry.

There is a big difference between intellectually recognising that Earth is alive and directly experiencing an ensouled world. Through the wild window of deep imagination, we might experience the soul of the world – in all its dimensions, textures, hues, and wild voices – in intimate relationship with our mysterious human soul.

Teachers

Bill Plotkin

Dr Bill Plotkin, describes himself as a “psychologist gone wild.” An underworld guide, depth psychologist, and agent of cultural evolution, he’s been blazing new trails for decades. His ecocentric re-visioning of psychology invites us into a conscious and embodied relationship with soul and with the more-than-human world. As founder of southwest Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute, he has, since 1980, guided thousands of women and men through nature-based initiatory passages. He’s also been a research psychologist (studying nonordinary states of consciousness), university professor, rock musician, and whitewater river guide. In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack mountain, Bill experienced a “call to spiritual adventure,” leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. Bill is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (an experiential guidebook), Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (a nature-based stage model of human development), and Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (an ecocentric map of the psyche — for healing, growing whole, and cultural transformation). To learn more about Bill and Animas Valley Institute, visit http://www.animas.org.

Geneen Marie Haugen

Dr Geneen Marie Haugen grew up a little wild, with a run-amok imagination. As a guide to the intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche, she delights in multidimensional listening and in offering perceptive questions, ceremonies, escapades, and reflections that help expand a sense of our own possibilities as individuals (and as a species), and deepen our experience of participation with an intelligent, animate Earth/Cosmos. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth; Thomas Berry: Dreamer of the Earth; Written River; Parabola Journal; KosmosJournal; Langscape, and The Artist’s Field Guide to Greater Yellowstone. A former tipi-dweller and whitewater river guide, she now lives amidst the creatures and features of southern Utah’s sandstone labyrinth. She is exploring the awakening of what she calls “planetary imagination,” and the possible emergence of a new mode of the human that she has called Homo imaginans. She is committed to the world-transforming potential of the human imagination in collaboration with the Earth community.

Watch

In this Earth Talk, Bill Plotkin offers some imaginative possibilities for cultivating a greater affinity between the breathing, inter-dependent patterns of nature and our human participation in a world brimming with intelligent presences.

Bill Plotkin PhD, describes himself as a “psychologist gone wild.” A cultural visionary and wilderness guide, he’s been blazing new trails for decades. His ecocentric re-visioning of psychology invites us into a conscious and embodied relationship with soul and with the natural world. He is the author of Wild Mind; A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, Soulcraft, and Nature and the Human Soul.

Fee:

£ 795.00

Course fees include basic accommodation, all meals, Earth Talk tickets, field trips, materials and all teaching sessions. The programme will run from Monday to Friday afternoon, and includes four nights private accommodation and all vegetarian meals from the first lunchtime you arrive through until the lunchtime before your departure. We ask you to arrive between 11:30 - 1 on the first day of your course so that the group can begin the experience by dining together. We recommend attending this course as a fully residential participant however for you may choose to book as a non-residential participant. Please call 01803 847237 for more details.

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Schumacher College is part of the Dartington Hall Trust, a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and as a charity(company no. 1485560, charity no. 279756). Registered office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, United Kingdom